VARIATIONS IN MEANING OF TERMS. 269 



become more and more generalized, and less and less 

 expressive, take place in a still greater degree with 

 the words which express the complicated phenomena 

 of mind and society. Historians, travellers, and in 

 general those who speak or write concerning moral 

 and social phenomena with which they are not fami- 

 liarly acquainted, are the great agents in this modifi- 

 cation of language. The vocabulary of all except 

 unusually instructed persons, is, on such subjects, 

 eminently scanty. They have a certain small set of 

 words to which they are accustomed, and which they 

 employ to express phenomena the most heterogeneous, 

 because they have never sufficiently analyzed the facts 

 to which those words correspond in their own country, 

 to have attached perfectly definite ideas to the words. 

 The first English conquerors of Bengal, for example, 

 carried with them the phrase landed proprietor into a 

 country where the rights of individuals over the soil 

 were extremely different in degree, and even in nature, 

 from those recognised in England. Applying the term 

 with all its English associations in such a state of 

 things ; to one who had only a limited right they gave 

 an absolute right, from another because he had not 

 an absolute right they took away all right, drove 

 whole classes of men to ruin and despair, filled the 

 country with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was 

 secure, and produced, with the best intentions, a disor- 

 ganization of society which had not been produced in 

 that country by the most ruthless of its barbarian 

 invaders. Paul Louis Courier might well say, " Gar- 

 dez-nous de 1'equivoque!" Yet the usage of persons 

 capable of so gross a misapprehension, determines the 

 meaning of language : and the words they thus misuse 

 grow in generality, until the instructed are obliged to 

 acquiesce; and to employ those words (first freeing 



